The years fly by so quickly

Cathy Salter

Monday

Dec 28, 2009 at 12:01 AMDec 28, 2009 at 1:00 PM

At dawn on the first day of the new millennium, the pond at Breakfast Creek was still asleep as I slipped into the dark interior of our barn. As cats stirred in straw beds, arched their backs and dropped back into the circular imprints they had formed in the night, I entered the first stall, filled a bucket with cracked corn and pushed open a side door to feed our ducks and geese near the pond.

Suddenly, a wooshhhh ... wooshhhh ... wooshhhing broke the dawn silence. A hushed, breathy sound rose from the pond, like air passing through a bellows into a glowing hearth. Was it our pond reawakening after sleeping for weeks beneath a layer of ice? What could the wooshing sound be if not the pond itself? Then I see him. A pencil-thin blue heron surprised out of an unguarded, deep sleep. Lifting up from a one-legged stance in three slow-motion extensions of his Pterosaurean-sized wings, the heron rises just high enough to escape. Then, in a whisper, he drops silently down to roost in the skeletal branches of a fallen tree at the back of the pond, becoming once again only a shadow the color of night.

As I head back to the house, Kit meets me with coffee in hand, and we walk around the pasture and woods that surround the pond. I check berry thickets and note areas that need cutting back some sunny winter’s day. We talk about this territory along an edge of Breakfast Creek that seems to have a life of its own. Some creatures in the wild tolerate our intrusion into their territory, but not the blue heron. For the second time in one morning, I’ve disturbed his solitude. This time, he lumbers aloft, lifting over the trees to spend the remainder of the afternoon at some quieter pond just beyond the edges of our wooded world.

Then Kit suggests we take a millennial dip in the water to welcome in the New Year and century. “You’re kidding,” I say, knowing full well he has already made up his mind. After shedding his clothes and dipping a toe into the frigid water, he hesitates momentarily. “I need a minute to talk my feet into this,” he says with an audible shiver.

“It was still ice yesterday,” I remind him. And so it was that Kit joined that international fraternity of polar swimmers who test their constitutions annually by taking a ceremonial swim in one of the world’s frigid bodies of water. I remained at the sidelines with a towel, enormously relieved I was not moved by a competitive urge to match his icy feat.

Last week, Kit and I took a similar dawn walk around the meadow at Boomerang Creek, our home now for nearly half of the past decade. Early morning sounds of goats bleating and roosters crowing can be heard coming from our neighbor’s barn, visible beyond our shared fence line.

Our coat pockets are filled with carrots in case the neighbor’s horses are grazing somewhere in their pasture. Lost in conversation, we’re startled by their sudden, apparition-like appearance, as though they’ve skated across ice from some sheltered spot to the fence line. Huge and wooly, they are eager to sample whatever we’ve brought along.

On this wintry morning in the final week of a decade filled with unanticipated changes for us, for the nation and for the world, we looked back at that quiet morning at Breakfast Creek, now frozen in our memories, when this past decade was just awakening.

Flocks of Canada geese honk as they pass in formation over Boomerang Creek en route to and from their river flyway five miles to the west. And although we no longer have a pond of our own, I know our shadowy old friend the blue heron is somewhere nearby, watching over us each day and night of the year.

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